Cineversity 2010 NAB Cinema 4D Tutorials

Cineversity just posted two Cinema 4D demo presentations from NAB 2010 and will be posting more by the end of the month. I was lucky enough to be one of the presenters and one of the first videos available to watch.

I highly recommend that you watch the other presentation from Mike “The Monkey” Senften. His presentation of using sound tracks in Cinema really opened my eyes to ways of controlling animation with sound. I really love his presentation style too. Really energetic and passionate. You can tell he loves what he does and loves explaining the process. I’m hoping to get Mike on Greyscalegorilla to talk more about his incredible work. Check out his presentation below.

If quicktime has a “?” on it, it might not play. I had the same issues as well, but if you look below there’s a link to a beta player. It’s in flash. That one worked perfectly for me. It still took long to stream, but it worked without hassle.

Great Nick, I was wondering when it would be available.
I’ve been watching Autodesk presentations at their website since last week. Maxon would do the same, since the need of having a Cineversity account may be a pain for some people.

ps.: quicktime issue here as well. this new quicktime player completely su***.

I was having issues last week when they first put it up but I only have to let it buffer a couple minutes ahead now, weird there’s so many issues with this. I emailed cine and they said they were experimenting with codecs to improve it.

It’s seriously worth watching Mike’s if you weren’t considering it. No disrespect to Nick (I’m sure he won’t take any) but if you’ve been around here a while you won’t learn too much new stuff he hasn’t already shown until the end apart from how dashing Mr Campbell looks wired into a Britney Spears mic 😉 haha… but the Monkey’s presentation is mind blowing in terms of how he thinks about animation. Really gets you thinking about how to introduce new things into your workflow.

Only 8 hours of downloading for a 200MB file. I often achieve beyond 200KB/s on my connection. But with Cineversity it’s 6.5 KB/s. What a shame.

Maxon needs to immediately ditch Cineversity and just upload their videos to youtube, to their existing Maxon account.

Maxon should be thankful that people are even interested in switching over from industry standard Autodesk products and actually help teach new users without shaking them down for a paid membership with awful streaming ability.

On top of that Maxon customer/technical support is the absolute worst. Ever have a problem or want to report a bug? Good luck receiving any kind of response back. Additionally they cannot even be called for support.

Maxon has been riding the wave of quality user created content and tutorials like the ones provided on this site to increase sales. Yet they give nothing back support wise.

The Maxon “community” would be so much stronger if all tutorials and resources were just simply uploaded by Maxon to Youtube or Vimeo.

I have let Cineversity know about the abysmal download speed of their NAB videos and am working with them to find a better way to get this content out. I will let you know when they find a better solution.

For now, Just set it to download in the background and watch it when it is ready in an hour or so.

Hate to be rude, but their site totally sucks-
I’ve been trying on and off to watch these since they put them up a couple days ago, and still haven’t seen a thing.
Youtube and Vimeo just -work- I don’t know why they have to be all difficult about it at Cineversity

First of all, my name is Amir and I’m 26 from Israel … Apologize for my English
I’m learning from you lot, and enjoyed every minute of it
I have two questions for Cinema 4D
How do I create dollars to convey a sense of paper .. I want to create a section that many dollars falling to the floor
How do I create these things displayed video

Sincere apologies to everyone having troubles viewing the videos. Cineversity is ordinarily quite fast when theres a few simultaneous views and the movies are quite short. The system wasn’t well designed for handling hundreds of simultaneous views of 200+ mb movies.

We are now getting them live onto Livestream but they take quite a while to reencode on the livestream system so currently only Mike’s is available, Nick’s is encoding right now and should be available in a couple hours.

We will try to have the rest of the presentations on both Cineversity and Livestream at the same time before announcing them to help prevent this issue. Nick and Mike have both promoted their videos very well and that popularity is hitting Cineversity hard.

We appreciate your patience and understanding and hope that you all get to view the videos soon.

Thanks for taking your time to post here. I understand that your system was not setup for this amount of viewings. However, your solutions to remedy this are completely wrong. How many times did you see posted that people would like to view these on a slow Cineversity livestream with interrupting ads at all?

Not once.

Simply putting these on your already existing Maxon youtube account would have been far better. Not only this but you must recognize that Maxon would prosper much further by simply transferring all of your Cineversity content to Vimeo or Youtube instead of milking paying customers to enroll in Cineverstiy.

As is customers do not receive the proposed “12 months of technical support” at all! This would be a way of actually treating your customers properly and in turn making Maxon loads more money. Since interest in C4D would increase due to the amount of content openly viewable.

Maxon already has somewhat realized the popularity that Greyscalegorilla (and other tutorial people) has had an effect on the amount of software sold. Why else would Maxon feature Nick’s work on their website and have him speak at NAB?

If you care for your customers at all, immediately transfer all Cineversity content to Youtube or Vimeo and I will forgive you for giving absolutely unacceptable customer support service.

Think about this, your system was unprepared for hundreds of people actually wanting to view these videos. By doing so Maxon has not quite grasped the proper solutions to the trends that have occurred particularly this past year:

1. C4D has increased in popularity by huge accounts due to Greyscalegorilla and other free training sites, not by actual Cineversity interest. So “upgrading” your current system is a complete waste of resources and not the solution in any way. People do not want to deal with your archaic Cineversity site, especially if you have to additionally pay for it after purchasing the software.

2. There is a potentially endless amount of people that might switch over from the industry standard products, but you must give them a reason to do so. Building a better “community” that actually listens better then all other software packages; while introducing what they want in the software is the way. Not by shoehorning your customers to pay further for an inferior system of streamed training and not actually giving them the proposed “12 months of technical support”.

Youtube is free which you know since Maxon has an account there. Why this wasn’t used? Vimeo is $60 for an entire year. Stop wasting money on supporting Cineversity and instead take those same working people and create a vimeo group/channel that interacts with the customers.

If you would like to discuss this further please leave an email contact and I will take all of the time necessary to help.

I am kind of confused by his quick explanation of how to use the sound effector to generate user data to be plugged into data tracks. I was unable to generate user data based on the expresso setup shown and had to switch the weight port with a strength port to see any results at all. the values generated were extremely low, can someone explain this? i don’t have much experience with expresso but found his use of it with data tracks interesting.

YES! I loved Mike the Monkey Senften’s presentation. It completely blew me away and made me want to cry and crawl into the corner in fear of its pure awesomeness:)
But, seriously, I’m interested in that one part where he created a liquid look just within C4D using the Smooth plug-in from Welter 4D and Metaball…(?) I’ve been trying to figure it out with no luck. Various google searches later, I’m brought back to one of my favorite tutorial spots – Greyscale Gorilla!
Could I request that you spend the next few tutorials on GSG deconstructing his techniques?

Keep up the great work Nick, you are one of the hardest working people in tutorial land, I really really appreciate it. Looking forward to purchasing the lighting set-up you released soon (I’m a student:)

awesome nick i enjoyed it rly much.
And Mike’s sound techniques are very very important and cool, i start to use them because i haven’t used much sound in my animations and im very happy with the results

Hey Nick! Very good presentation. I´m learning a lot from you! I´ve got one question about that 7up project: how do you make the clones go to the third state, I mean the second spline text? Greetings from Brazil!

you key frame the strength of the effector, so the first effector goes from 100% – 0% in 10 frame’s and the second one goes from 0% – 100% in about 15 frames starting 5 frames before the first effector, if u dont start the second one before the first, the cloner objects will go back to the cloner before they goto the second state. or atleast they did with me.

This is verry nice tutorial.I have a question related to this tut.Will you please explane to me : how did you made cloned cherrys to move to the second spline .I saw a square passing the “cherry” spline.You never mentioned about this.I tryed everything ,but no luck yet.

YYYYhhaaaa….I did it!!! I tryed to folow dannys way,but had no luck.Tryed to keyframe secon text 5 frames before first one,but couldn`t get it right.Later I just decided to make sequence 1,then just aded second text and second spline effector and it works.
Check it out:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRsB-3WIpgU
But still would be nice to see the tutorial,cuz Gorilla`z cherrys are moving nice,like a vortex or something .

Hey Nick, thank you so much for this amazing site. Trying to figure out how to download Mike’s presentation on the livestream site – i usually use firefox’s download helper, but that doesnt seem to be working. is there another place i can download this video at? thanks!

May I simply just say what a relief to uncover someone who actually understands what they’re discussing on the internet. You certainly understand how to bring a problem to light and make it important. A lot more people really need to look at this and understand this side of the story. I can’t believe you aren’t more popular given that you surely possess the gift.